By Ramona Zacharias.

James Lapine

Some 30 years ago, writer James Lapine and composer-lyricist Stephen Sondheim created a musical that has charmed audiences across the world for decades. Weaving classic fairy tales with more contemporary fiction, Into the Woods tells the story of a baker and his wife who are unable to have children. Discovering their barren nature is the result of a curse placed on them by a witch many years ago, they set off into the forest in search of items the witch has promised she can use to break the spell.

Set inside a much larger plot involving such characters as Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, Rapunzel and Jack (and his beanstalk), Lapine uses his original tale of The Baker and his Wife to bring together some of the most beloved literary characters while injecting a more modern sense of humor and ultimate lesson of “Be careful what you wish for”.

Performed on stage countless times in numerous countries since its Broadway debut in 1987, this Christmas director Rob Marshall and an all-star cast (Meryl Streep, Johnny Depp and Emily Blunt, to name a few) bring Lapine’s story and Sondheim’s music to the big screen. Here, we go down memory lane with Lapine to chat about the origin of his story, its many adaptations, and his task of rewriting it for film almost 30 years later.

Let’s go back to the ‘80s for a few minutes and when you first wrote Into the Woods…what initially sparked the idea for this story?

The original stage version came about – as things often do – in a kind of roundabout way. Sondheim and I had just completed another show and we’d just get together and chat to see what was on our minds and the kind of projects we wanted to do. He expressed an interest in doing something along the lines of what he would call a kind of “quest story” – a kind of Galahad or Odyssey or Wizard of Oz…people going in search of something. And I was interested in doing something with a lot of plot.

I had this idea of doing an original fairy tale because I was going through a period in my life where I was very interested in Jungian therapy and theory…and fairy tales always interested me. He said “well that sounds interesting” so I set off to write a fairy tale. And then I found after a few weeks that it was really hard! Basically because fairy tales, by their very nature, are short and when you try to make them longer you’re not really keeping to the form.

What’s interesting in fairy tales is the plots often turn on a dime. The one I was working on became more interesting when I had the idea of having it weave in and out of other fairy tales. So I went back and did research on fairy tales and found the ones that would fit together nicely given their timeframe…and that’s sort of how it all began.

James Lapine and Stephen Sondheim

Tell me a bit about your research into fairy tales…were there any particular texts you looked to besides Grimms’ Fairy Tales?

I don’t like to do too much theoretical research. I had read mostly Bruno Bettelheim and Marie-Louise von Franz, who was the big “Jungian fairy tale lady”. Mostly what I was looking for were structural clues…and I certainly went off the Grimm Brothers more than the Perrault versions of the fairy tales since I thought they were much darker and more curious. So you have Cinderella, for instance, going to the ball three times in Grimm, and by the time Perrault got around to it, I guess he decided once was enough! So that was how that all wove together. Once we had the outline of what we were doing, then it became more about figuring out “well, why are we telling the story, what do we want to say and how do we want to say it”. That evolved later.

What did you enjoy about inhabiting such classic literary characters, while incorporating your own original story into the plot?

They’re quite bizarre, these stories, particularly the Grimm Brothers’. And I have to say the morbid, dark side of me loves the idea of toes and heels getting cut off and little girls cutting up wolves! So I was surprised when I read them because I think Sondheim’s reference was primarily to the Disney cartoons and my reference was primarily to the illustrations of fairy tales. What I remember most is a book in our house that had original – I think Rackham – illustrations, and they’re really what caught my eye. So going back and reading them, I was surprised to discover a lot of the darkness in them and found the idea that these very dark stories were what people told their children pretty interesting.

And then we always got around to our fairy tale being sort of the more contemporary “viewership” if you will, in this world…that they were us, drawn into the primordial forest to make our way through all that has passed before us. We used to joke about The Baker and The Baker’s Wife being from Brooklyn! But that was helpful because you needed that kind of point of view to bring both the humor to it and the pathos that they were these regular people in an irregular world. So that brought us a long way too.

Emily Blunt as The Baker’s Wife and James Corden as The Baker

Speaking of the dark elements, does this story have a target audience? Are the lessons that are in it geared towards any particular demographic or are they more universal?

I don’t think it has a target audience. I think what’s wonderful about these stories is they’ve lasted century after century and I think they’ve lasted because they speak to every generation and to all ages. Reading these stories as a child they mean one thing …if you’re a parent reading them to your kids, they take on a whole other kind of point of view. And I think Into the Woods hopefully does the same thing. I’ve been joking that I wrote it from the point of view of The Baker – that’s certainly the person I most related to – and now I relate more to The Baker’s Father! Kids obviously relate to the kids in the story. So I don’t think there’s a target audience per se…fortunately for us, what’s given it life for 27-odd years is that the audience seems to be of all ages.

You’ve seen your story brought to stage – and now screen – in numerous adaptations over the years. What changes have you see in the different productions and what have you liked about the variations?

I’ve really enjoyed seeing it because it lends itself to so many, kind of bizarre, interpretations. It’s performed often in schools and that’s always fun because it’s great to see how the kids realize it. It’s also fun to see little kids trying to play older people.

I’ve seen some bizarre and very large productions. There was one in Germany where Little Red Riding Hood was dressed like a hooker with a tiny little skirt and enormous high heels and this cape…I don’t know quite what that was all about but it certainly was amusing! So you name it, I’ve pretty much seen some variation on it, one way or the other. There was another one where the curtain went up and The Baker and his wife were in lounge chairs with a couple of beers in their hands. So it’s open for interpretation and I guess that’s a good thing when you’re a writer…that people have the freedom to do with it as they will. The story is pretty strong and it doesn’t get in the way of it so much.

James Lapine and director Rob Marshall with Corden and Blunt

Tell me a bit about how this project to bring it to screen with Rob Marshall came about.

Rob is someone that Steve knew a little better than I in the theatre; he had worked with Steve on a couple of shows as choreographer. I know Rob was always interested in doing one of Steve’s shows and he’s the one that approached us both about doing Into the Woods. So we didn’t go after it or him – he came to us.

How did you find the experience of going back to an original story and rewriting it for a new medium? How did you approach that task and did you enjoy it?

It was interesting. I’m very visual in my thinking, so that aspect of it was very exciting to me – to be able to open it up. I think certain things on the stage don’t necessarily lend themselves to film adaptation, but I think this one did by virtue of the fact that it lives in such a visual world. And so that was exciting to explore. When you write for the theatre you’re always aware of the limitations of the stage, and here was an opportunity to take the same story and think “well gee, if I had no limitations, what would it be like to look at, what would it be like to see?”

Then there were more difficult things, in the fact that we had to do a shorter version – that meant that certain things had to be cut, trimmed, or eliminated altogether. But mostly what was interesting for me as a writer/director was just being a writer and not having the whole responsibility on my shoulders. I enjoyed following Rob’s lead in a lot of cases – he’s very collaborative with everyone he works with, certainly his production team and his acting team. So that’s wonderful. But at the end of the day, he had to follow his own judgment to make the hard choices and I respected that and did the best I could to help him.

James Corden and Emily Blunt, with Meryl Streep as The Witch

How involved were you in the casting process?

Not so involved; Rob did do a reading of it in New York, and that was very helpful to hear it read. A few of the people from that reading remained in the show itself. He would mention who he was talking to, float the names by Stephen and myself…but it was really his call. We certainly weren’t going to weigh in too heavily on that because he had the vision of what could make it work. I thought what was so great about what he did was that everybody auditioned. With probably the exception of Meryl Streep and Johnny Depp – because he had worked with Johnny and Meryl I don’t think needs to audition for anything, ever! But they all auditioned and they sang and he was very intent on only hiring people who could sing. I think you can feel that when you watch the movie, that it’s really their voices.

You’ve seen numerous actors inhabit your characters over the years…did you write them with anyone specific in mind? What do you feel this particular cast brings to your story?

Sometimes you write with a prototype in mind, more than a particular actor. Sometimes you might say, “I see Jimmy Stewart in it”…it’s helpful for me anyway to have a voice in my head or a kind of person. But then once you get the real person who’s going to play it, it opens up all other kinds of possibilities. So you try to keep yourself open to different people playing it. I think if you, as a writer, make it too narrow a portrayal, it’s going to limit it. I’ve seen Little Red Riding Hoods who’ve probably been from age 10 to 45! Sometimes they work and sometimes they don’t…it’s all open.

I think this cast is just spot on – I just thought he did a brilliant job and they did a brilliant job. What may have helped is the fact that it’s been around for such a long time and so many people have played the parts. That helped make actors want to be in the movie and I think it gave Rob a lot of other performances to think about in terms of what he wanted to do and the things that he might have seen that he liked or the things that he might have seen that didn’t appeal to him. So it all kind of worked hand in hand a little bit.

Anna Kendrick as Cinderella

Both Rob Marshall and John DeLuca (producer) have commented on how open you were as a writer when you approached this collaboration with them. Is that a rare quality and how important is it to have in this industry?

I’ve written about a half dozen screenplays and a lot of it just depends on whether they’re self-generated – which some of them were, they were original ideas that I wrote. Some of them were adaptations, some of them were rewrites, some were for producers…but this was the first time I actually wrote with a director, and I liked that very much. My wife is a screenwriter and we’ve been married almost 30 years, so watching what she’s gone through in the screenwriting world has been entirely informative in its own way.

In theatre, the writer is pretty much the king. The writer really has a lot of sway and that’s not, as you must know, the case in movies so much. That’s more of a director’s medium. So I think as for me being open, I really wanted to write the adaptation – but I also didn’t want to be a prisoner to it, particularly seeing as it was my initial creation. The irony was that I was more willing to change things than I think Rob was! Rob really wanted to hone pretty closely to the original material, so it was interesting. But as a writer in general I’m pretty open – sometimes maybe too open. I just think you need fluidity – you need the free flow of ideas and if you get rigid, particularly adapting something, or rigid to a precept of ideas, it often can really work against the excitement that can come out of writing and directing.